“Because I wanted to find out what you were up to. I found it.”
“So he’s the person we thought we saw!” I said to susan. The
conviction in my voice astonished even myself. “You poor fool, we
noticed something in the shadows and left in a hurry. But we went back,
carreras. Oh yes, we went back. To dr. Caroline. And we didn’t waste
any time talking to him either. We had a far smarter idea than that.
Miss beresford wasn’t quite accurate. I didn’t arm the twister. Dr.
Caroline himself did that.” I smiled and shifted my eyes from the beam
of the torch to a spot behind and to the right of carreras. “Tell him,
doctor.”
carreras half turned, cursed viciously, swung back. His mind was
fast, his reactions faster; he’d hardly even begun to fall for the old
gag. All he’d allowed us was a second of time, and in that brief moment
I hadn’t even got past tightening my grip on the hammer. And now he was
going to kill e.
but he couldn’t get his gun lined up. Susan had been waiting for
the chance; she sensed that i’d been building up towards the chance.
She dropped her lantern and flung herself forward even as carreras had
started to turn and she ad only about three feet to go. Now she was
clinging despirately to his gun arm, all her weight on it, forcing it
down towards the floor. I twisted myself convulsively forward and that
two-pound hammer came arching over my shoulder and flew straight for
carreras’ face with all the power, all the hatred and viciousness that
was in me.
he saw it coming. His left hand, still gripping the torch, as
raised high to smash down on the unprotected nape of Susan’s neck. He
jerked his head sideways, sung out his left arm in instinctive reaction:
the hammer caught him just below the left elbow with tremendous force;
his torch went flying through the air, and the hold was plunged into
absolute darkness. Where the hammer went I don’t know; a heavy rate
screeched and rumbled across the floor just at that moment and I never
heard it land.
the crate ground to a standstill. In the sudden momentary silence
I could hear the sound of struggling, of heavy breathing. I was slow in
getting to my feet; my left leg was practically useless, but maybe it
only seemed slow to me. Fear, hen it is strong enough, has the curious
effect of slowing p time. And I was afraid. I was afraid for susan.
Carreras, except as the source of menace to her, didn’t exist for me at
he moment. Only susan: he was a big man, a powerful man; e could break
her neck with a single wrench, kill her with a single blow.
I heard her cry out, a cry of shock or fear. A moment’s silence, a
heavy soft thump as of falling bodies, a scream of agony, again from
susan, and then that silence again.
they weren’t there. When I reached the spot where they had been
struggling, they weren’t there. For a second I stood still in that
impenetrable darkness, bewildered, then my hand touched the top of the
three-foot baffle and I had it: in their wrestling on that crazily
careening deck they’d staggered against the baffle and toppled over on
to the floor of the hold. I was over that baffle before I had time to
think, before I knew what I was doing; the bo’sun’s knife was in my
hand, the needle-pointed marlinespike open, the locking shackle closed.
I stumbled as the weight came on my left leg, fell to my knees,
touched someone’s head and hair. Long hair. Susan. I moved away and
had just reached my feet again when he came at me. He came at me. He
didn’t back away, try to keep out of my reach in that darkness. He came
at me. That meant he’d lost his gun.
we fell to the floor together, clawing, clubbing, kicking. Once,
twice, half a dozen times he caught me on the chest, the side of the
body, with sledgehammer, short-arm jabs that threatened to break my
ribs. But I didn’t really feel them. He was a strong man, tremendously
strong, but even with all his great strength, even had his left arm not
been paralysed and useless, he would have found no escape that night.
I grunted with the numbing shock of it and carreras shrieked out in
agony as the hilt of macdonald’s knife jarred solidly home against his
breastbone. I wrenched the knife free and struck again. And again.
And again. After the fourth blow he didn’t cry out any more.
carreras died hard. He’d stopped hitting me now; his right arm was
locked round my neck, and with every blow he struck the throttling
pressure of the arm increased. All the convulsive strength of a man
dying in agony was brought 0 bear on exactly that spot where I had been
so heavily and bagged. Pain, crippling pain, red-hot barbed lances of
re shot through my back and head; I thought my neck was going to break.
I struck again. And then the knife fell from y hand.
when I came to, the blood was pounding dizzily in my ars, my head
felt as if it were going to burst, my lungs were heaving and gasping for
air that wouldn’t come. I felt as if were choking, being slowly and
surely suffocated. And then I suddenly realised the truth. I was being
suffocated; e arm of the dead man, by some freak of muscular
contraction, was still locked around my neck. I couldn’t have been out
for long, not for more than a minute. With both hands I grasped his arm
by the wrist and managed to tear it free from my neck. For thirty
seconds, perhaps longer, I lay ere, stretched out on the floor of the
hold, my heart pounding, gasping for breath as waves of weakness and
dizziness washed over me, while some faraway insistent voice, as
desperately urgent as it was distant, kept saying in this remote corner
of my mind, you must get up, you must get up. And then I had it. I was
lying on the floor of the hold and those huge crates were still sliding
and crashing around with every heave and stagger of the campari. And
susan. She was lying there too.
I pushed myself to my knees, fumbled around in my pocket 11 I found
marston’s pencil flash, and switched it on. It still worked. The beam
fell on carreras and i’d only time to notice that the whole shirt front
was soaked with blood I involuntarily turned the torch away, sick and
nauseed.
susan was lying close in to the baffle, half on her side, half
on her back. Her eyes were open, dull and glazed with shock and
pain, but they were open.
“It’s finished.” I could hardly recognise the voice as mine.
“It’s all over now.” she nodded and tried to smile.
“You can’t stay here,” I went on. “The other side of the
baffle-quldck.”
I rose to my feet, caught her under the arms, and lifted. She came
easily, lightly, then cried out in agony and went limp on me. But I had
her before she could fall, braced myself against the ladder, lifted her
over the baffle, and laid her down gently on the other side.
in the beam of my torch she lay there on her side, her arms
outflung. The left arm, between wrist and elbow, was twisted at an
impossible angle. Broken, no doubt of it. Broken. When she and
carreras had toppled over the baffle she must have been underneath: her
left arm had taken the combined strain of their falling bodies and the
strain had been too much. But there was nothing I could do about it.
Not now. I turned my attention to tony carreras.
I couldn’t leave him there. I knew I couldn’t leave him there.
When miguel carreras found out that his son was missing he’d have the
campari searched from end to end. I had to get rid of him, but I
couldn’t get rid of him in that hold. There was only one place where I
could finally, completely and without any fear of rediscovery, put the
body of tony carreras. In the sea.
tony carreras must have weighed at least two hundred pounds; that
narrow vertical steel ladder was at least thirty feet high; I was weak
from loss of blood and sheer physical exhaustion and i’d only one sound
leg, so I never stopped to think about it. If I had, the impossibility
of what I had to do would have defeated me even before I had begun.
I hauled him to the ladder, dragged him up to a sitting position
against it, hooked my hands under his shoulders and jerked up his dead